Bill Kerby Courtesy John Ptak Bill Kerby, the maverick screenwriter who wrote the first draft of the Bette Midler-starring rock drama The Rose and worked on The Last American Hero, The Gravy Train and Hooper as well, has died. He was 88.
Kerby died Aug. 13 on Whidbey Island in Washington state, producer John Ptak, his longtime agent, told The Hollywood Reporter. He had been in hospice care at home but had fallen and suffered a fracture, he added.
A full-time writer in Hollywood for 30 years, Kerby received an Emmy nomination and a WGA award for penning the three-part 2012 miniseries Hatfields and the McCoys, which starred Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton and was a huge ratings success for the History channel.
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He had started on the project for producer Leslie Greif at CBS in the 1980s, and it would turn out to be his last credit.
In 1973, Kerby had written reviews of rock concerts and interviewed musicians when was hired by producer Marvin Worth, who had a deal at 20th Century Fox, to write a rock movie, “one loosely based on Janis Joplin, a female singer, rise and fall, live the life, die the death,” he recalled in an entertaining 1980 interview for the Writers Guild Foundation. “I was even more of a nobody then than I am now, but they made me a deal.”
Bo Goldman, an Oscar winner for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, worked on a week-to-week contract revising Kerby’s script that was originally titled The Pearl, and The Rose (1979), starring Bette Midler, Alan Bates and Frederic Forrest and directed by Mark Rydell, would be nominated for four Oscars. (He and Rydell died on the same day.)
Kerby said he was extremely proud that one of his original scenes for the film, the one where Midler’s Mary Rose Foster is rudely dismissed by her idol, country music star Billy Ray (Harry Dean Stanton), remained intact through so many script iterations over so many years.
The colorful Kerby said he had to overcome some personal challenges early in his career, calling himself a “hyphenate … I was a ‘writer-producer hater’ — that was my hyphenate.
“Writing is hard enough. To be a great asshole is hard enough. But to do both things at the same time will kill your career.”
William Kerby was born on Dec. 13, 1937, in Buffalo, New York, and as a kid he lived in Lakeside, Michigan; San Diego; Bremerton, Washington; Phoenix; Michigan City, Indiana; and Tryon, North Carolina.
He attended Christ School for Boys in Arden, North Carolina, and then Tryon High School as president of the senior class before serving with the U.S. Marine Corps from 1955-57.
At Kent State University, he appeared in productions of The Little Foxes and Under Milkwood, then moved to New York City, where he pursued acting and worked as a welfare investigator.
Watching PBS one night, Kerby was taken by two student films made at UCLA and applied for admittance into its film school. He was accepted in 1964 and four years later earned his master’s degree. (Ptak, Rob Reiner and future Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek were among his classmates.)
The pony-tailed, motorcycle-riding Kerby, who had worked for Roger Corman while at UCLA — he was hired to go to cities around the country and edit Dennis Hopper out of release prints for The Trip (1967) — taught at the Chouinard Art Institute and wrote about music for the Los Angeles Free Press before Warner Bros. brought him into a writers program at the studio in 1969.
He got a big break when he was hired to replace two fired writers on Lamont Johnson’s The Last American Hero (1973), the stock car movie at Fox that was based on an Esquire essay by Tom Wolfe and starred Jeff Bridges and Valerie Perrine. (He got to rewrite scenes while the film was in production in North Carolina.)
He had lunch in London with all four members of The Who and landed a deal to write the screenplay for Tommy (1975), but the band ultimately went with Ken Russell’s vision.
Up next, Kerby revised Terrence Malick’s original script for Jack Starrett’s The Gravy Train (1974), which starred Forrest and Stacy Keach as West Virginia coal-mining brothers who turn to crime.
(A displeased Malick is credited under the pseudonym David Whitney on the film — also known as The Dion Brothers — which has attained cult status after being praised by Quentin Tarantino and others).
“It was weird and wonderful as only Terry writes,” Kerby recalled. “It was real early in his career, so it was heavy on the weird. So I un-weirded it a little bit and put a whole lot of my stuff in it, because I’m from that part of the United States, from Appalachia.”
He then rewrote Thomas Rickman’s script for Hal Needham’s Hooper (1978), which starred Burt Reynolds as a legendary Hollywood stuntman.
Kerby said he preferred rewriting to starting from scratch.
“You get in and you get out quick … the check always clears, and if you did a great job, you saved the picture. But if you didn’t do a great job, it was the other fucker’s fault,” he said. “It also is somewhat easier to doctor because you have the patient laid out in front of you. If you have to birth the baby too … it’s just tougher.”
Meanwhile, The Rose was slowly making its way to theaters, with Kerby learning that Midler had been hired for the movie in the trades.
He later had a story credit on Michael Winner’s Firepower (1979), starring James Coburn and Sophia Loren, and a screenplay credit on another action thriller, Dead Men Can’t Dance (1997), starring Michael Biehn.
His TV résumé included a 1985 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents; the 1988 Australian miniseries Dadah Is Death, starring Julie Christie; and telefilms including 1978’s Steel Cowboy, starring James Brolin; 1994’s Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee, directed by Frank Pierson; 2000’s Little Richard, helmed by Robert Townsend and starring Leon; and a 2000 remake of the apocalyptic On the Beach, starring Armand Assante and Rachel Ward.
A big fan of the 1979 Syd Field book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting and the IBM Correcting Selectric II typewriter, Kerby taught his craft at the National Film School in London for a few years each spring.
And because he had sole story credit on The Rose — that as a result of a WGA arbitration hearing — he controlled the rights with Fox and had worked on an adaptation for Broadway.
“The voices of students from the small AFI, UCLA and USC film schools provided the catalyst for change in the ’70s as music and the traditional studio systems were evolving,” Ptak said. “Bill Kerby was part of that wave.”
Survivors include his wife, Paula, whom he met and married in 1996. They moved from Santa Barbara to Whidbey Island three years later.
“A writing routine was easy,” Kerby said in 2011. “When it rained, I was inside and didn’t get wet like the roofers.”
What he did for a living was “so much fun, truly,” he noted in his Writers Guild Foundation interview. “I don’t want to direct, I don’t want to produce, I don’t want to do the boom, anything like that. All those things stand in your way of being a really great writer. To be a great writer, you’ve got to do it a lot.”
Scott Feinberg contributed to this report.
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